Category Archives: feminisms

Read a children’s version of the Mahabharata. We are reading Devdutt Patnaik’s The Boys Who Fought.

Come to the part about Shikhandi. Let the questions begin.

Nene: But why?

Me: Why what?

N: Why did he want to be a boy?

Me: So he was born with a woman’s body but he always felt like a boy inside so his family let him be (this is basically explained in the version I’m reading with a simple backstory about Amba).

N: oh okay.

Move on to the mighty Arjuna hiding behind Shikhandi to shoot down his invincible granduncle.

That’s it. Something that many adults seem to think is very complicated and scary is acceptable to a kid in about 1 minute. This is not to say that encounters with trans people will be seamless but all questions can be referred back to “Remember Sikhandi in the Mahabharata…” As an added bonus, the whole thing is sanctified by the great Indian epic.

On the other hand, my kids found it almost impossible to grasp the caste system, something adults seem to have an easier time coming to terms with, which we encountered in Sowmya Ranjendran’s wonderful The Boy Who Asked Why, about Dr Ambedkar,

“But why?”

“But why what?”

“Why did he have to sit at the back of the class?”

“Because it says here, society was like a ladder with groups of people arranged from highest to lowest.”

“But why was he the lowest?”

“Because he was born in a family that was considered the lowest.”

“But why?”

“Yeah it’s stupid.”

Cue uncomprehending expressions.

I might have to work harder at this, and also break it to them that it’s not a past tense thing.

I bought three things for the kids from a woman who was selling stuff for charity. Two Smiggle things and one science kit. I wanted to use one of them to bribe Mimi to get her teeth pulled.

Nene who had already succumbed to his tooth being yanked got to choose one. I had got the science kit with him in mind but he picked the Smiggle mood watch.

I asked him if he would wear it to school and he said no. I asked why. He did “because it’s girly.” “But it’s blue,” I said before I could stop myself. Apparently it’s the wrong blue – boy blue is dark, girl blue is light. Moreover, it’s contaminated by the odd pink button.

“But you like it, right?” I pressed and he nodded. “And you’re a boy so how come this is a girl’s the thing?”

“It just is,” he said.

“Do girls like to play football?” I asked.

“No because it’s a boys game.”

“But there are girls in your school like Z who is such a fast runner.”

“Yeah but she won’t play football. Maybe tag.” These are eight year olds.

“Just like you like the mood watch but won’t wear it to school because you’re scared of people making fun of you, don’t you think there might be girls who love football but are scared to play at school. Isn’t that silly?”

“Hmph.”

But you know, boys will be boys, gender is fixed and natural, this is The Way Things Are.

I did not listen to Dr Christine Blasey Ford testify before a senate judiciary committee about being sexually assaulted by the man set to sit in judgement of and hold the fate of countless women in his hands.

I did not need to. The main parts of Dr Ford’s statement had been public knowledge before she was compelled to out herself and face the judgement of the whole world. I did not need to hear her speak her pain and trauma out loud, I did not need to hear her voice crack or to witness her keeping her composure so that she could be a model witness, the only kind that has any hope of garnering belief if you’re a woman.

I believed Dr Ford from the start. I tend to believe women. What part of her story was unbelievable anyway?

Then two other women stepped forward and it was clear to me that this is going to be another Bill Cosby situation if it was given enough time.

Dr Ford wants an FBI investigation because she knows that only with time and persistent digging will the truth she has lived with so long be confirmed in the eyes of the public. Her opponents want to rush this through – why?

As always we hear cries of due process – but Dr Ford is the one in fact arguing for process. If she had whispered her story softly and let the wheels of bureaucracy turn, she would have been ignored. So she kickstarted due process by going public. Her voice could then not be stifled or ignored even if she herself did not want the limelight. That is the essence of #metoo – not the disavowal of due process but the forcing of it so that “troublesome” women are seen and heard, not smothered. In coming forward, these women – even in our current climate of disclosure – stand to lose a lot. Contrary to popular belief, these women are judged too, to stick their necks out is a risk.

My belief in Dr Ford is not the only reason I walked out when V started listening to her testimony. I was triggered. How many of us, I wonder, have had the privilege of not knowing what it feels like to have the dead weight of a man grinding on top of us while we try to push him off. Maybe we struggled in vain, maybe at some point we switched off, maybe we were confused and didn’t know what to do until it was too late. Maybe we were very young.

The word triggered is associated with the word snowflake. I’m not sure where I stand on trigger warnings. I don’t see how they could be harmful, though I wonder if it’s ever possible to cover the whole range of triggers.

I do find it is a useful description for ow I feel these days when I hear details of sexual harassment in the news. There is a disjuncture between the horror of it and the normalisation of life going on around the television set not to mention the detachment of the talking heads.

It does not help that V watches Fox News because ‘entertainment.” I can get on board with the value of not living in an echo chamber but sometimes the misogyny and racism is too much to hear.

Dr Ford’s trauma is personal.

And what of the accused – the man who quipped, then cried, then professed his love of beer? I can only say that no woman fighting for her career could have gotten away with the way he handled that hearing.

Would he barefaced lie to the public? Yes, he would. He has more to lose than Dr Ford. Lying is his only recourse at this point. And he didn’t even do it very well.

Besides, remember Bill Clinton?

I am convinced Brett Kavanaugh will get the job he wants and that in a few months it will be life as usual. Because isn’t that what normally happens – men getting away with it is so normal that what’s one more?

But! I am remedying my paucity of Austen reading, having just confessed to it.

There has been reams written on Jane Austen’s work so far be it for me to even attempt to say anything new or worthwhile. However:

1. Having read Pride and Prejudice first (one of my all-time favourite novels ever), I blasphemously began to think that the two novels were too similar. Two women of modest means fall in love, are thwarted (the lovers absent themselves), a rival woman presents herself, one man proves to be a rake, over-talkative maternal figure, snooty elderly aristocrat etc.

But then I realised – the difference is the perspective. Sense and Sensibility is written from viewpoint of the sensible and good sister, Pride and Prejudice from that of the feisty one.

Of course, Elizabeth is a far cry from Marianne in intensity, but maybe that’s why she’s Austen’s perfect heroine – all that strong feeling but tempered by good manners and judgement.

2. An aside: Why does Jane Austen always write in pointless extra sisters? In Pride and Prejudice, Kitty, and here, even more so, Margaret. Oh Austen experts, do explain.

3. Marianne typifies the excess of emotions that came to be known as the romantic sensibility. Elinor represents the demands for people to hem their feelings in, in the wider social interest.

The introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel I read cited Foucault who talked about how there was explosion of diagnoses of mental illness in the 19th C. Women were, of course, prone to hysteria.

Marianne expresses this hysteria in her scream at the heart of the novel when she receives Willoughby’s letter. While Austen seems to circumscribe her heroines in the need for good manners (and thus curtailing their emotions), she gives Marianne this space to grieve … and scream.

3. Now Serena. A big, black woman playing a white man’s sport, who has been slighted since she and her sister made their presence felt on court. A black woman whose rage will always be unruly.

Serena is our Marianne. She refuses to play by the rules and be either nice or dainty. Serena broke the rules of the game – the game of polite society in which women must contain their emotions, must express them rationally. How many of us have been told by men: “don’t yell.”

Serena touches this nerve of the Marianne in us. She is the big woman told to make herself smaller. She is the black woman whose rage threatens the social order because it is twice alien – black and female.

Like Austen did, we know the rules of propriety. And yet, can we help sympathising with the woman who broke them?

If you’re wondering whether this has become a books blog, not intentionally. But since the PhD, I have been reading like a fiend. The stuff I post here is a drop in the ocean of my entire reading existence. I’ve been reading tonnes of fiction but also some theoretical stuff.

Life has been going fairly smoothly since I started the new job and though I have rants connected to it, nothing I would want to post online. I’m also fairly busy, so when I think of random things, I don’t always have the time to pound out a post, alas, and then I lose the momentum for it.

The fact that I have a Master’s in English Literature and never read any of the great Russian novels has been a niggling botheration over the years. On the one hand, as I age, I have come to believe that life is too short to waste reading stuff you’re not into given as that there are so many great books that one could alternatively read and enjoy (I have the same approach to dessert – no point eating, say, jelly if you don’t like wobbly stuff because it’s not like those calories are nutrition and they’re basically going to sit on your hips forever). On the other hand, I felt I should at least try to read a great Russian novel, or rather, try again – because my one attempt at The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky gave me a headache but that was while I had malaria so the jury is out on what the cause of the headache is.

Gratuitous confession – I have only read Pride and Prejudice of all Jane Austen’s novels. I keep feeling I should read at least one more so that I can justify claiming to be an Austen fan, but I’ve never managed to get through any of the others. What say you – can I be a card-carrying member of the Austen club having read only one novel?

Speaking of Austen (and I have no idea why I seem to be writing in point form, possibly in an attempt to pre-empt my propensity to go off on tangents, which is clearly happening anyway):

My first impression of Anna Karenina was that it was Austenian. An aristocratic family, three sisters, courtship. Why on earth was I so scared of this novel?

Crazy Rich Asians came up and colleague commented derisively about it (having never read it) and then I said it’s Austenian, and he said, “You like Austen?” and proceeded to tell me some disparaging thing Mark Twain had said about Austen. I mean, this is the year two thousand and eighteen of our lord jesus jones and we still have to defend Austen to condescending men, do we?

Of course, noone would dare criticise Tolstoy, although Anna Karenina proceeds very similarly. The difference is, however, the breadth. It proceeds past courtship and scandal to early married life, pregnancy and death so that it could never be excused of providing a fairytale ending without tearing the veil of what comes after.

Of course, I liked the courtship and marriage parts best. Tolstoy has an – dare I say it (and I mean it as the ultimate compliment) – feminine way of observing social relations and getting into people’s heads. Like how women are totally into weddings, while the men are basically indifferent, except the bridegroom who is both clueless and totally moved. Having read the wedding scene in the novel on the back of Crazy Rich Asians (lookit here, I brought Crazy Rich Asians together with not only Austen but also Tolstoy!), I’ve decided that as jaded as I am about marriage, I am just going to be one of those people that smiles like a fool (and sometimes even tears up) at weddings. I guess weddings are like births, they’re like hope in a pretty pink/white wrapping paper. You know it’s going to be a nightmare after, but they can’t help but provoke euphoria.

Also, I like that Tolstoy takes love seriously. None of this pomo irony about romance. No siree, Levin will be all gloomy and fed up with life, the universe, and everything, then he sees Kitty and it’s like, heh, everyone is wonderful. Isn’t that basically love? (at its best, anyway).

Levin’s take on intellectuals also hit quite close to home – something along the lines of people going on and on about the rights of this and that but usually living in comfortable homes for whom the poor/marginalised etc are an academic problem. Well intentioned, but somehow disconnected. My time in academia showed me that a lot of people I thought were deeply involved in some cause – making me feel somehow lacking by not being activisty enough – actually were dabbling and moved on from that cause once their academic interest shifting. This is not everyone, and academics deserve credit for thinking through and being socially engaged, just that sometimes all the outrage and earnestness seems to … performative. And also tiring.

That said, Tolstoy hammered this home a bit too much, what with the long description of the bewildering voting process, discussions on farming, meaning of life whatevs. I suppose we are supposed to marvel at the depth of Levin/Tolsoy’s mind, but I just wished they would move on to the relationships.

While Levin is apparently a stand-in for Tolstoy, he offers a refreshingly female-sympathetic perspective. For example, when Levin judges Dolly on her parenting, Tolstoy writes that Dolly had thought through all the things Levin did and arrived at this as the best way to parent her child (and I feel like this passage would be apt on our local mom’s Facebook page). Or when Levin thinks Kitty is just “doing nothing”, Tolstoy writes that Kitty knows what is coming in her role as wife and would like to just enjoy this early free period a bit. There is also an amazing description of birth (from Levin’s and thus a male perspective, but one that honours the experience, even as it honestly conveys both the father’s awe and his detachment from the wriggly red baby)

Have you noticed that I mentioned Anna Karenina, the woman who the book is named after, very little. This is because I didn’t love her, even found her annoying at the end, though apparently Tolstoy deliberately left Anna as an enigma and the annoyance that one feels with her is exactly what one drives her to desperate measures. The way the novel ties the beginning and the end through a dream is just one of those flourishes that puts Tolstoy there among the greats.

To my utter astonishment, as I began reading the novel, I had the feeling that it would be up there on my favourites list. When I finished it, I would say that half of it is one of my favourite novels. I feel it went on a tad too long, but there is something to be admired in its scope.

Now I’m all, I need to read more Russians. What next – Gogol? Pushkin?

In this series, I write about chick lit novels, focusing on chick lit outside the Anglo-American context. I started out calling this series Indian Chick Lit Hall of Fame, but I’ve realised that I’m going to be reading and writing beyond that geography, and just because these are novels are neglected by the Western world, doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a place in global chick lit listings.

I should have read this novel during my PhD, but not so surprisingly, I didn’t have time. Having read it now, I have mixed feelings about not having read it earlier. On the one hand, it would have enriched and broadened by analysis (I referred to a study on this novel, but didn’t end up reading it); on the other, it may have changed my entire focus.

Either way, I’m glad I got my hands on it because I LOVED IT.

I totally did not expect to love it, and that’s why I kept putting off reading it (even though given my PhD specialisation I knew I had to read it). I expected it to be a superficial brand-name-dropping Sex and the City sort of thing. It was not.

Yes, the four women at the centre of the novel – Sadeem, Michelle, Gamrah and Lameez – belong to the ‘velvet class’, the Saudi elite, and yes, within the first few pages, one of them refers to her dress being Badgely Mischka. But the book also has stunning poetry, religious verses, social critique and what we love best about chick lit – a reflection of the lives of young women, their struggles, their loves and their friendships.

Like all other chick lit novels, these women are single and the pressure they are under to marry is similar to Indian women. The difference here is that more than Indian chick lit, the question is ‘how’ and not ‘if’ or even ‘when’. Like Indian chick lit, though, there is a ‘love’ versus ‘arranged’ marriage dichotomy, except that despite their elite status and relative freedom, most of these women will have arranged marriages – or at least marriages that absolutely cannot go ahead without family approval.

How these women go about finding love, and how they come up time and again, against the strictures of their society, is the subject-matter of the novel. In her wonderful study of love in new Bollywood cinema, Sangita Gopal, points out how love has always been a trangressive force, possessing the capacity to upset the social order, and she shows how Hindi cinema contains this force by reconciling the individual and society. The transgressive power of love comes up time and again in Alsanea’s novel.

But how does this trangression even take place? Isn’t Saudi Arabia supposed to be one of the most repressive place in the world for women? Because, you know, what else would it be given that the women have to go about dressed head to toe in black, right? Okay, we know they are apparently shod in couture underneath, which they reveal only in the presence of women, but that only makes them weirder, right?

My first window into wealthy Saudi society Princess by Jean Sassoon would have me believe this. Fabulously wealthy, yes, repressed and ultimately terribly sad and not-so-latently barbaric – also yes. There is a little vignette in Almost Single along similar lines – exotic princess, rich but unhappy. The recent detention (assisted by our very own Indian coast guard if you please) of the princess from the UAE seems to confirm this view.

Of course, reality is a bit more complex, and Girls of Riyadh exposes this. We meet our protagonists at a wedding where, yes, the women are separated from the men (and again, this should not be utterly unfamiliar to us in India where Muslim communities are not the only ones to practice this segregation) but they are dressed to the nines and dancing seductively. Women dancing with abandon, and generally letting their hair down, again, should not seem so strange because isn’t this every farewell party in a convent school and generally, why we have girls nights out?

Yet, it is not exactly the same, and Alsanea doesn’t present it as so either. At the wedding, at some point the men came rushing into the room “like arrows” with the groom and the women hurry to cover themselves (this is apparently part of the ritual). Only the groom stayed, though, while the men went home leaving the women to continue the party late into a night (a reversal of expectations). Later, when the girls unique pre-wedding celebration (their version of a bachelor’s party – they eschew the Western form because in their community it would involve inviting everyone and including a famous Arabic singer, which would not only be expensive but also too cliched), they drive to a mall and are besieged by young men trying to pass them their numbers.

This is how young men and women ‘meet’ – the men hold up cards with their numbers, the women memorise them and call them if they so desire and their romances are conducted over the phone and if possible, the internet, often without meeting but very intense nevertheless. The behaviour of some of these men (e.g. following the girl in her car) might seem stalkerish but their advances are not exactly unwelcome, because it is the only way.

Did you notice I said ‘drove’ to a mall? But Saudi women aren’t allowed to drive, right? Well, as ever, women find a way to get around these things. Michelle, who is half-American, learnt to drive and because the cars have highly tinted widows (to prevent men peering into them), they have the advantage of making the driver invisible to the outside too. The point is not to say things are la la la – they’re not – but that people always find ways to circumvent repressive laws.

Moreover, on this excursion, a young man presents himself, and joins them by pretending to be a relative. So while apparently there are security guards who may question men who are with women, this is easily dealt with if the women are willing to say that that man is a relative. The whole rakhi brother syndrome, if you please.

And what of these men? As our protagonists meet and fall in love, they are often disappointed by the objects of their affection, who ultimately refuse to defy their families in the name of love. And while the narrator has no sympathy for these characters, the novel exposes that it is not only Saudi women who are trapped in their social system.

Apart from the young single women, I found myself drawn to the aunties, a category I’m increasingly fascinated with, now that I’m one myself. In a patriarchal society, some older women – such as the mother of a man who ditched one of the girls and Gamrah’s mother – wield a fair amount of power. There is Lameez’s mother, who stomps into her school and insists the principal stop picking on her daughter. And most intriguing of all, is the divorced woman next door who hosts their conversations and sometimes their rendezvous.

The treatment of divorced women caught my attention . The aunty next door is reviled more for the possibility of her son being gay, than her divorced status and she continues her job as a school teacher. When a man divorces a woman, this is almost accepted as par for the course by the family, and there doesn’t seem to be the possibility of them not taking her back (as some Indian women seem to face) although life becomes harder from her as she becomes a suspect person, a walking display of sexual possibility because of her limbo state – single but not ‘pure’ – and so her family must closet her till she is married again. Even if she is pregnant, it is taken for granted that she and her child will be taken care of by her family, and even her ex-husband’s family might show interest in the child. In some ways, it seems like the society makes provisions for divorced women.

Apart from the four protoganists, there is a fifth character – the narrator. The entire tale is apparently related in a series of emails and I initially found this is a little annoying. However, later, I realised that the purpose of the narrator was the reflect the comments of society on the story. Thus, she comments on reactions from both conservatives and liberals alike, and people from different sections of society, and responds to them. She notes that it is the women who respond most angrily to her story and the men most sympathetically, for example.

The narrator is also a critique of readerly fascination with the author and the reader’s tendency (a tendency especially pronounced in chick lit, which as realist fiction presents itself as a direct reflection of life) to identify the author with the protagonist or in the case of multi-protogonist novels, to guess “which one the author is.”

Throughout, it is clear that this is a religious society and that the women live according to their interpretations and engagements with a religious code. But it is pointed out that there are varying levels of engagement with religion and that this engagement is split along gender lines so that conservative men’s engagement takes different forms from conservative women’s. Our four protagonists are of a liberal bent, but even the most bold of them, might after marriage, decide on her own to adopt the hijab.

Finally, I happened to read some reviews of the novel in the West and I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that what these Western reviewers took away from the novel was that it was not feminist enough, because basically the women did not throw off “Islamic fundamentalism” (when none of them were fundamentalist in the first place, so why or how would they throw it off?) or for the crime of seeking liberation in setting up a party planning business (failing to recognise how radical this step is, especially for a divorced woman). In his groundbreaking book Orientalism, Edward Said shows how the West created it’s self-image in contrast to an uncivilised and barbaric Other and how Western modernity – and colonialism and its ‘civilising’ mission – is predicated on this contrast. In the reviews of this novel, I see that Orientalism is alive and well.

Did I love this book simply because it is unfamiliar, as a friend once suggested might be why I enjoy watching any mainstream Hong Kong film?* Is it simply the novelty of the new? It is possible that I gave the book more leeway because of my pleasure in being immersed in an unfamiliar culture. Sure, the translation was not perfect – even the translator had problems with the final text, raising interesting questions about who owns a translation – but increasingly, I find myself favouring these imperfections that remind you that you are not in your same-old Anglo-American dominated context.

Finally, while many of us in India also like to think of Saudi Arabia as the weird Other and that we are “so much better off”, are we? I recall my encounter with a Saudi man on a flight. He was sitting next to me and we got chatting when I needed change to buy my Airport Express pass. On hearing that I was flying alone to meet my fiance and he would not even be meeting me at the airport, he said surprised, “I thought Indian women were like our women.” I paused and said, “There are lots of different kinds of Indian women.” My point was not that Indian women are much more liberated than Saudi women, but that there were in fact lots of Indian women living not dissimilar lives to Saudi women (yes, we have fairer laws in general, but personal life is still regulated by the different religious laws in India) and in fact, I could be the exception.

Let’s keep this in mind when we read the book, how we are more similar than we think, and how there’s work to do in our own backyards.

*This same friend also said he enjoyed the Twilight movies, so I might take his view of things with a pinch of salt.

This is the novel by Advaita Kala, who went on to write televisio and movie scripts, that gets mentioned the most often in connection with “Indian chick lit” and that’s probably because it’s pretty classic in following genre conventions.

The novel is basically a compilation of the shenanigans of Aisha, the protagonist, and her group of friends – Misha, Anushka and a gay couple Nic and Ric – as they live it up in the city. Aisha works in a hotel, which gives her an inside view into the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and she and her friends partake of a more modest version of the same.

For a single girl, we never get a description of the mundane parts of being single – like paying the rent and maintaining your own house and coming home to an empty apartment. We never even get a description of the apartment.

Instead, Aisha’s life is lived outside, in cafes, clubs, nightclubs and terraces. We have a more intimate portrait of the hotel in which she works than her home. She can apparently finance all this – and buy a Rohit Bal sari – with her customer service executive salary. Okay.

If the nitty gritty of being single may not be entirely realistic, the novels provide a series of anecdotes depicting the highs and lows of being single – being footloose and fancy free but also the not-so-fun pressure to get married and the vague suspicion from the neighbours that one is somehow a scarlet woman. The pressure is not entirely external though – these women feel that need to take matters into their own hands and find a mate.

This is a characteristic feature of neoliberalism – an economic model in which private enterprise takes its own course and survives in a market with little government intervention. Ideologically, this means that each individual is responsible for themselves, a DIY approach to life down to how we fashion our own selves.

The distinct way in which Aisha and her friends pursue ‘remedying’ their single state is symbolic of what it means to be a young, single, urban woman. They get on dating websites, but Aisha has an astrologer in speed dial. They also have a havan (which they fuel with alcohol) and meet a holy woman, who it turns out drives a Mitsubishi Lancer. There’s all this not-so-latent tradition-modernity stuff going on. The biggest indication of this is Aisha wearing a sari over jeans.

The other striking aspect of the novel’s depiction of the single life is the close-knit circle of friends. In this, the novel is very Sex and the City. The things the friends do – Sunday brunches at a five-star hotel but also taking revenge on errant exes and helping each other dress for special occasions – but also the discussions about their love lives.

The most interesting character in the novel to me was Anu, Aisha’s friend who separates from her husband. We see flashes of her life only in terms of revengeful antics, but there is real pain and in the end development there that would have made an interesting story in itself.

The book also pointedly includes a gay couple, somewhat ridiculously named Ric and Nic. While this inclusion is in fact a genre convention, it is also tritely done – they are fashionistas, they make lascivious comments, they like the good life. One of them proves to be more adept at traditional femininity that the girls themselves – winning a nosy and disapproving neighbour over with his skill at choosing vegetables. Eve Sedgwick has warned of the ‘inversion’ trap where a gay man is seen as an inverted woman – and I think Nic (or is it Ric) falls into this.

On the surface, these women want to get married, but there is a latent unease with tying the knot. There is not a single happy couple in the novel – except tellingly the gay couple Nic and Ric. Aisha herself seems ambivalent – she pursues Karan, dolls up in a sari to impress his mother, but also seems reluctant to actually commit.

Maybe it’s because Karan is so … vague. At least on paper. I couldn’t really get a clear sense of him – in the way that we get of Anuja Chauhan’s heroes, for example. What makes him attractive – apart from being wealthy, good looking and somewhat arrogant and in control. Basically, he is the bare bones of the Mr Darcy figure, but not fleshed out at all. This is not unique to Kala’s novel; a number of chick lit novels have love interests who are a conglomeration of certain traits, without being fully formed people. It is like the authors have a fantasy man in their heads, but can’t completely write them into reality except as an outline of a person. This does have the advantage of making the female characters much more central, which I can’t complain about, even if it does make the romance slightly unconvincing – as if the protagonist is in love with a cardboard cutout.

This lends itself to the sneaking suspicion that the novels are less about love and more about being single – they depict the single life more fully and realistically than the romance, with the mandatory happy ending almost coming as an aftermath, a tick the box to readers’ expectations. The result is that being single seems more realistic and even fun than the thing the novels are supposedly progressing towards – being coupled.

Have you read the novel? What did you think?
Is being a single woman in India mostly a footloose and fancy free experience, interrupted by annoying questions about getting married?
What does being ‘almost single’ mean?

Leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. Train your heart
like a dog. Change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. You lucky, lucky girl.
You have an apartment
just your size. A bathtub
full of tea. A heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. Don’t wish away
your cracked past, your crooked
toes; your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought
because the vendor was so
compelling you just
had to have them. You had
to have him. And you did.
And now you pull down
the bridge between your houses.
You make him call before
he visits. You take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. Make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. Place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
Don’t lose too much weight.
Stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. And you
are not stupid. You loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. Heart
like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas.
Heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

***
— Marty McConnell

I had a vague sense of deja vu, as if I was reading the wrong peom, and then I remembered this:

FRIDA TO SHARANYA

Sleep wherever is most convenient for you.
Whoever and whatever is left in the morning,
take home. Be kind. All the world is yours for
the taking, long as you know that your little heart is
theirs for the breaking. Leave lipstick on their
china and on your letters. Make sure they know
that you’re a mariposa, blue as copper sulphate,
or blue as the sea, blue as a baby stilled too soon,
darling wench, and you never really intend to leave.
Set love free like a boat with neither oars nor anchors.
Trust it. Don’t trust yourself. Accept every familiar
that comes, even if one happens to be a goat. Forgive
less of people. Remember that things come in triptychs.
Be magnificent, like Coatlicue. You only owe it to me,
but break a mirror now and then, if you can afford it.
Kiss as much as you want to, and as few. Be difficult.
It will make you more desirable. If it will help you to
let him go, cut off your hands. They will grow back.
You don’t need them. You don’t need him. The older
you grow, the more you will amputate. Dance on stumps
if you have to, but don’t stop. Wear one item of red
every Wednesday and when death comes for you,
you will go as his bride. Burn every bridge you ever
built, and build as many as you possibly can. The one
that takes you home will be the last one standing.
Sing over the bones. Go slow.
Don’t forget me.

***
— Sharanya Manivannan

The lesson is clear. In times of heartbreak – of any kind – ask yourself: “What would Frida say?” and proceed accordingly.

When I read Elena Ferrante’s novels, I feel like my nerves are on edge, like I’m in a world of complicity, that they are – through strangers in a strange land – saying what I feel, telling my story. For the one and a half day or so it takes me to inhale the novel, I am in a fog, emerging only reluctantly to the ‘real’ world. V senses this, maybe I get a certain look, and he gets angsty. This too mirrors the world of the novels.

I was predisposed to like Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Books about the strong bond between two girls – it sounds quotidian like this, but I know from experience that it is always more – sign me up.

But it was The Story of a New Name – which ironically is the story of an old name, the names that both girls keep – that really swallowed me. My Brilliant Friend seems almost like backstory, the childhood of poverty and the family and neighbourhood connections that made these women who they are. I did not love the writing, which I suspected would be better in the original Italian. There were powerful sentiments in that novel and the writing conveyed it, despite itself.

[spoilers alert]

The Story of a New Name yanked me in from the start. I’m glad it began where My Brilliant Friend ended – at Lila’s wedding. As we learn what happened to her in excruciating detail, I have flashbacks of my own. No, I was not beaten bloody on my wedding night, but I did have a similar sense of disconnection, this idea that the one one had chosen for stability, for being different, after a heady and charmed courtship that only soured towards the date, was more of the same and the only way to cope, was to detach emotionally if not physically.

Which one am I? is the obvious question, the question a female reader would ask, a tradition at least as long as Little Women, a book Lila and Lena too discovered and that triggered their ambition to write themselves to a better place. The two girls are distinct and yet their names lend themselves to blurring. Lila is Lila only to Lena; she is Lina to everyone else, just as Lena is Lenu.

I identify with Lila’s cold rages more than Lenu’s self doubt. But overall, I’d say I’d identify with Lenu, the bookish wallflower who slowly discovers her place in the world. I’m not sure I had a longstanding Lila. I did have one friend who would qualify in terms of both looks and impetuosity if not intelligence (Lila is a prodigy). In a sense, it is both their intelligence and their emotional complexity that defines the two girls.

In the matter of love, I am more Lila. Lenu stays with and makes out (for want of a better word since they significantly did not have sex) with Antonio although she considers him her inferior. She likes and is attracted to him but balks at committing to him forever. Been there done that.

But Lenu has her sights on the cultivated, intellectual type symbolised by Nino, and it has always puzzled me how I do not share this attraction. From early on, I saw Nino for the self/absorbed brooding intellectual male that he is and hoped Lenu would not pursue him. I was almost relieved that he met his match in Lila, though I empathised (somewhat) with Lenu. Why she didn’t just tell Lila early on or even a bit later what her feelings were is one of my frustrations with her, but I guess that’s how people are. They don’t always do the logical thing and sometimes the face-saving gesture turns into quicksand. But apart from disliking the arrogance and essential selfishness of the intellectual male type, I’m also rarely attracted to that type at a baser sexual level. It’s like a mind body split with me. Or maybe at some level I’m just scared of a competition I will lose and prefer to be the admiree not the admirer in love?

Like Lila in her choice of Stefano, I tend to choose the classically masculine and seemingly safe type. That this safety does not always last is probably part of the package and our (Lila and my) outsized drama at its crumbling is also of a piece.

I am all about female friendships and yet I have only once had that kind of intense singular bond with a woman. Maybe the intensity of it is why I have usually deflect the possibility of such relationships with women, because the potential heartbreak so much more searing.

The thing that set me apart from these characters is of course their poverty. The book makes the reader identify with Lenu and so with her struggles to make it through the upper middle class milieu or academia. Her realisation is of lacking what Pierre Bourdieu called the cultural capital of the middle class; her experience is akin to that described by Dalit students in India, the feeling that no matter how hard you try, you lack something undefinable that is essential to success. Ironically, the reader would have to be of the privileged class, just to be reading the book.

This book engulfed me so totally that having digested and spat me out, my nerves tingling, I’m actually holding back from reading the next one. For one day at least.

It’s apparent that the #Metoo movement has now entered the backlash phase, with critiques of the movement going too far, the dangers of not following due process, etc. etc. It is almost amusing to see “liberal” men expressing their unease, of course prefaced with how they absolutely respect women but you know.

Over dinner, one of my friends started pontificating about the movement and how now some woman in the US is suing her boss for putting his arm around her, and how Michelle Williams got money out of Mark Wahlberg. His rant was filled with misinformation (e.g. Williams never asked Wahlberg for money, but he was embarrassed when it was pointed out how he was paid so much more than her to reshoot scene in their movie and so donated the money to the Time’s Up fund, not to Williams). But more obvious was his discomfort at the opposite gender essentially striking back.

Then someone else said how offices have now become so constrained by fear that one hesitates to even compliment a coworker. The clincher was when one guy started suggesting that the women who were abused by Harvey Weinstein kinda sorta deserved it because why would they go there at night.

All through this the women in the room maintained silence, until someone could bear it no longer and shared her own experience of sexual harassment in the workplace and how an arm around a woman can be really creepy depending on whose arm it is and where it is placed. A couple of others, including myself, pitched in.

But apart from a few comments, I stayed quiet and when I could bear it no longer, walked away. I am actually quite proud of myself for not really engaging. My policy on these issues is that these kind of drawing room discussions cost more than they are worth:

Certain topics concerning politics and social justice tend to get heated. People have entrenched positions, and it’s hard to ensure that the discussion remains civil especially after a couple of bottles of wine. Better to not even go there. If one does engage, compose one’s response, state one’s position and then back off. There’s no point getting into an argument in a social setting, because honestly I have yet to see anyone getting ‘converted’, people just go away upset.

Discussions related to women’s issues are particularly triggering for me. They are both theoretical and deeply personal. I cannot trust myself to keep my composure and be polite in the face of thinly veiled misogyny.

Usually men discussing women’s issues do not want to learn or change. They want to win. If they wanted to learn, they would listen more carefully to women instead of mansplaining our lives to us.

There is so much information out there on gender injustice – and other forms of social injustice for that matter – that people serious about educating themselves could do so without demanding explanations from those at the receiving end of injustice.

It is not incumbent on the disenfranchised to explain and justify their pain to the privileged.

Those of us interested in social justice have to save our energy for bigger fights, to pick our battles carefully.

I respect and am grateful to those women who choose to speak up and patiently engage with these men who just never get it on the off-chance that one of them may see the light (though the odds are slim). However, I reserve the right to not be that woman all the time, even though I am an avowed feminist. Sometimes, if I feel up to it, I will. Somtime’s silence or a dignified exit is the best response to willful stupidity, which is really fear and defensiveness.